Friday, March 30, 2012

Self-Portrait as Housewife by Austen Rosenfeld

Your dreams hold your days together.
You spend your time transforming stars into
kitchen implements that you could bake potatoes in.
Or coming up with one good reason for crying
over dirty socks or falling asleep each night with all
the lights on in the house. Waking, you can’t help
remembering the first, but not the only, time
you took off all your clothes and stood there
like a pile of unopened letters. And then
the kissing would begin; tongues rummaging like hands
through someone else’s desk drawer,
decoding his system for living. Remembering
those few extra minutes you stayed in the shower––
because you wanted to. Because it meant something to you.
A woman is wading through the dark rooms
of her house, each one stagnant and swarming
with loneliness. She wants to say I, but can only say You.
And a man hates his son’s crooked teeth so much
it hurts: they ring like a fire alarm. Pieces of a shattered
mirror keep falling in her eyes, she can’t help it.
Come now, the dishes never put themselves away.
Reapply your eyeliner, pick a fight with a saleslady.
Living is forgetting, blue wings beating against the window,
portraits through the centuries with every feature
exaggerated. I cry out to the trucks heading South, the shifting clouds,
anything that moves: I know what it’s like, take me with you.

About Me

Abha Iyengar is a widely published freelance author, poet, editor and scriptwriter. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals in India and other countries like U.K., U.S.A, Algeria, France etc. She has produced a poem film titled 'Parwaaz' which has won a special jury prize(Greece).Her published works are Yearnings (Serene Woods, 2010), Shrayan (Blue Pumpkin, 2012), Flash Bites (Authorspress, 2013), Many Fish to Fry (Pure Slush, 2014), and The Gourd Seller and Other Stories ( Kitaab, 2015).